Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet

Telerik Loves Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 RTMs!

Yesterday’s release of Visual Studio 2012 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 marks the beginning of a new era. In some ways, VS2012 and Blend are incremental releases, adding even better support for building enterprise and consumer apps and services for the desktop and the web. However, in one very important way, the release of VS2012 and Blend, together with the release of Windows 8 earlier this month, signals a whole new focus for the platform — that of touch-centric tablets — and with it, a whole new way to package and distribute apps for the Windows operating system — the Windows Store.

If Windows 8 sells even half of what Windows 7 has sold (which seems low, considering the support for a great number of new form factors), then that will represent 300 million customers all looking for new Windows 8 apps in the Store. Currently, that Store holds about 500 apps and even if Microsoft increases that number to 5,000 by general availability in October, that’s far short of the 500,000 apps that similar app stores have. In short, Windows 8 is going to have lots of users and those users are going to want to buy lots of apps. This is, of course, why Visual Studio 2012 and Blend are so important — they’re the tools you can use to design, develop and package your app for the Store and tap into those hundreds of millions of customers. Make no mistake — Windows 8 represents nothing short of a reboot of the Windows developer ecosystem and Visual Studio 2012 and Blend are the keys to that ecosystem.

Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 and Blend are important to Windows developers, which makes it important to Telerik customers. Because of that, we’ve been on the cutting edge here since the BUILD conference in September, releasing metro themes that first week and supporting the Beta and RCs in our tools and controls. And now I’m happy to announce that we fully support Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 and Blend across nearly all of our Windows developer products. And not only do we support them, but we take special advantage of their unique features in our products, as you can read in the following posts:

Of course, this is just the beginning of the tablet and mobile era for Windows developers, so count on Telerik to continue to push into Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 for building touch-centric apps for both the Windows Store and the Windows Phone Store, as well as continuing to push our products to meet your needs on the desktop and on the web. Telerik’s been right there through the last decade of Windows development and you can expect us to be there for the next decade.